I lost hours debugging a Next.js 16 caching issue that had no error, no warning, and only showed up in production.
The Next.js 16 caching model is genuinely good. But it introduces a class of bugs that are harder to detect than anything in previous versions: bugs that look correct, compile without errors, deploy successfully, and then silently misbehave in production.
These are the most common ones I've seen across real projects. Every one comes from real production incidents.
(Assumes you have cacheComponents: true enabled in next.config.ts.)
This is a follow-up to my previous post where I built a dev-only debugger to surface these issues during development. That tool helps you detect them. This post breaks down the exact failure cases behind those warnings.
